The Big Bang Theory Does Not Represent Science
(Caption: Cut the Creator some Slack)
Anyone puzzled by how some Americans don’t take science seriously need look no farther than how few scientists, themselves, take the scientific method seriously.
There is no better example of that credibility gap than the Big Bang Theory.
And this is the worst possible place for the flaw to occur, because the Big Bang has become the poster child for “science is smart, religion is stupid”…yet it’s not actually science.
Even my favorite sitcom, wherein some producer had the crazy nerve to try to create a show around the situation of INTELLIGENT people, The Big Bang Theory, assumes its name (apparently) as an attempt to show intellectual, potential viewers that it’s for them, not the common proles.
But the Big Bang Theory is pseudoscience, at best.
Bad
By the rules of hard science, it’s not even a theory. A theory can be tested in a way that would be sure to fail if it were wrong. This, with the Big Bang, is impossible so far. So it doesn’t qualify. It is a hypothesis.
For supposed scientists to refer to it as a theory is akin to Catholic priests and bishops referring to a contemporary televangelist as a Saint. There are strict rules for sainthood, and for scientific theoryhood, and if you just go tossing either word around you discredit the whole genre. Saint Tammy Fae Baker would undermine the concept of Christian sainthood exactly the way the Big Bang Theory undermines the concept of cosmogony as a science.
Worse
But it’s worse than that; the Big Bang Hypothesis is not just treated with the unearned dignity of being a “theory”, but even like a fact, despite having failed even the basic test of prediction.
Original big bang-based predictions of the temperature of the universe, its expansion, and the even-ness of background radiation all failed…but, in violation of the principles of science, bureaucrats just turned around and reverse-engineered new predictions that matched the existing observations.
But even if they had not, no theory EVER rises to the level of fact, based solely on its matching of predictions.
To quote Stephen Hawking:
Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis; you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory.
You don’t have to go as far as Anthropogenic Global Warming, to find scientists treating failed hypotheses as Settled Science, which is denied by not only Stephen Hawking above, but the Fallibilist roots of hard science.
Laughable
But it gets worse, still, when extreme atheists try to trot out The Big Bang as a solution for the Prime Mover paradox.
See, one of the arguments used by Creationists is that everything in the universe apparently needs to be caused by something else. Things don’t just happen out of nothing, there’s always a “cause and effect”. This means that, if the universe ever had a start at all, HOW it could start seems impossible to explain. There has to have been to be a First Event, that was not caused by anything at all, and that should be impossible.
“Science has solved that with the Big Bang”, the claim is made.
But it’s untrue.
In fact, the Big Bang hypothesis brings focus on the very power of the Prime Mover paradox. It appears to have the whole universe go back to a single point, but then does nothing to explain why it was AT that point in the first place. There is no way to explain why the potential for the vacuum fluctuation that (maybe) produced the Big Bang existed in the first place.
If the Creator of the universe were a timeless Christian god, perhaps that’s what caused the Big Bang. Sadly for science, this makes as much sense as anything the mainstream cosmologists have proposed to start it, so far*.
When people stick to the rules of hard science, they have an absolute right to say “see, this produces sounder results and more verifiable Truth than religion”, when it does. The problem is that modern “scientists” quite often are NOT. They don’t stick by those rules, and therefore earn the disdain that people heap on them.
Oh, and let’s not forget that I’m using the criteria of real science to argue this. Among the people who agree with me are Einstein, a Scientific Realist who opposed the instrumentalist pseudoscience of modern quantum physics, Schroedinger, whose famous cat experiment was intended to mock unscientific physics, and the father of modern hard science, Karl Popper whom Stephen Hawking is paraphrasing in his quote, above.
Next time some horrified Discovery Channel /NPR pundit moans quaveringly that “a majority of Americans don’t even believe in science over religion”, or the downright sneering at global warming claims, remember that this is as much the fault of the supposed scientists breaking their own rules, as anything else.
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Superstring hypotheses say the Big Bang is just the collision of “branes” (think membranes) in a much larger, more complex 10+ dimensional universe. But, while this provides the closest thing to a Unified Theory, it’s mostly ignored by the mainstream cosmologists. And, anyway, it does nothing to explain why the whole multiverse exists in the first place.
I Hope I Get Swine Flu
So far, some 2,700 people have been hospitalized with the current “swine flu” outbreak in the US. 3 have died.
Each year, some 200,000 people are hospitalized with the normal “seasonal flu”. About 36,000 die.
2,700:3
200,000:36,000
So for the regular flu, that’s an 18% chance of dying.
“Swine flu”, just about 00.1% chance of dying.
If I’m gonna get one or the other, I hope it’s h1n1 – the “swine flu”.
Refer to Beware the Coming [insert non-threat] Pandemic!!! for why this ridiculous hysteria started in the first place.
Hint: Fear Equals Funding
Why Don’t We Waterboard Criminals?
The original version of this article, with the horrifying, graphic depictions of neocons in their natural habitat, is here.
The neocons have been making a big deal of how waterboarding and other “psychological” tormenting of prisoners is not actually torture, unless you cause permanant, serious harm or death.
They also say that we GAIN things by using these “harsh interrogation techniques”, so that makes it OK:
The End Justifies the Means.
Well, yes, that is a Marxist/socialist slogan, which has produced millions of deaths and more suffering than any other idea in history.
And sure, real Conservatives spend their lives fighting against the End Justifies the Means philosophy…but we’re talking about neocons, RiNOs. The Neocon movement originates with self-described Trostyites, which is why they still have most of the underlying Marxist mindsets.
Anyway, I’m wondering why we’re wasting this technicality, in our own justice system.
Why Not?
If we can harm suspected terrorists in case it might make us safer, why not suspected criminals?
Protect Us from Criminals
Why not waterboard a possible serial killer, and then flush his bible (don’t ask me why so many psychopaths are strongly religious) down the toilet, in order to find out who he’s killed?
Why not strip an accused child molester naked, have women laugh at him, leave him in a forty degree room (still nude) all night with no sleep, in order to find out whether he did, and to whom?
These things are not torture, and anyway they are justified because we profit from them.
The neocon talk show hosts, and surviving neocon politicians (vote carefully, next primary) will quickly protest “but the 8th amendment bans that”. Apparently, interrogation can be cruel and unusual, yet not be torture, even though many court cases citing the 8th amendment actually bandy about the T-word interchangably.
But then we need only use a constitutional amendment to revoke this man-made priveledge.
Or why even bother…why not pass a law suspending the citizenship of anyone accused of a serious crime? And then rent space in an Indian/riverboat casino to conduct the Harsh Interrogation off of US soil?
Frankly, I need the neocons to answer the question, at that point, because I don’t see how their Philosophy of Cowardice could but DEMAND that we do this, in order to have greater safety from murder and rape.
Why Not
But I can explain why, to an actual Conservative, classic liberal, or any other decent human being, we must not “harshly interrogate” criminals.
We should probably set aside basic human decency versus evil, because if you don’t get THAT reason, then you probably never will.
Rights
Let’s start with that 8th amendment:
Yes, it (and a number of other parts of the Constitution) prohibit “harsh interrogation”.
But they do not grant a man-made priveledge only to Americans, that you can suspend with some Clintonian wordplay, the way the neocons and other socialists argue.
In fact, the 8th amendment protects a Natural Right. You, I, and any other sapient being are BORN with a right to freedom of speech, religion, self-protection, and many other choices, including not to be tortured without our consent.
The Founders knew this, and said specifically they were only mentioning certain rights in the Constitution to keep future sociopaths from finding excuses to violate them…but that ALL natural rights were still to be universally protected.
So using some technicality to violate those rights would not magically make them go away. Torturing the criminal would still be wrong.
And remember, “universally protected”: The Founders did not believe that those natural rights only apply to Americans. That wouldn’t be very “natural”.
They simply did not have the power to force the French government to protect natural rights. But they intended the protections to apply against the Federal government of the US, which was what the Constitution created and limited.
So when the Federal government violates the rights of a foreigner, it is absolutely against the spirit of the Founders. Something, once again, a Conservative understands, but a Marxist-cum-neocon does not. That, obviously, includes torturing them, as well as censorship and the many other violations the Bush administration committed against foreigners, showing themselves not to be Conservative at all, just neocons.
Principles
When people try to justify evil means, because the end is desirable, they are like a child who wants to spend his money on candy now, instead of saving it so they have enough to eat supper later.
This is because the “end” is always something short-sighted. You are giving up the thing that causes more good in the long run, the investment, in order to get a quick fix, the instant gratification.
Short-sighted is not always short-term:
Perhaps you’re going to kill ten million people now, so that in a generation your empire is small enough to feed itself. Ask Stalin and Mao about that. But you’re still abandoning the principles (everyone has a right to determine his own life) that makes society stable and healthy in the big picture. Even “easy way to feed the next generation” is short-sighted, if you’re murdering to do it.
So violating people, no matter what euphamism we use, brings harmful, evil precedents into our society. The REAL, long-term end is violated, even the safety that the neocons pretend to value above all else.
We cannot let government officials torment suspected criminals, because we are setting a precedent of condoning that evil behavior. If it’s OK to non-torture molesters and mass murderers, then why not rapists? How about people who stole, and still have hidden, the life savings of elderly people? Regular investors? Tax cheats?
Not protecting your principles makes the slippery slope, sometimes a fallacy, become real — nearly inevitable.
This is why we throw out ANY evidence gotten in violation of the Constitution or our natural rights.
And it’s why letting our government ever violate natural rights is wrong.
The very minimum standard for how we treat foreigners should be “Would we tolerate treating an American, who accused of a crime, this way?”
Real Americans Don’t Buy American
When you hear those lazy, tax-dollar-stealing car company reps on the radio saying you should “buy from us, or otherwise be sure to Buy American”, don’t forget that “Buy American” is unamerican.
Not only do they rob the taxpayers, but these lazy bureaucrats want us to buy inferior cars, out of fake patriotism
The American Dream is for everyone to earn their way, NOT for people to be given an easy way out with affirmative action.
And Buying American™ in order to protect overpriced, inefficient union monopoly jobs is the very worst form of Affirmative Action.
We Americans have, for good reason, a long-standing belief in “meritocracy”, people getting what they earn, earning what they get.
Most of us have ancestors who came here because they could earn what they deserved, regardless of class, nationality, or whatever…at least compared to anywhere else.
And they passed on the kind of attitude necessary for such a tremendous move. Most of us still have a healthy dose of it, today.
And we’re in the one place in the world where we still have some opportunity to exercise it. Not as much as America used to, especially not as much as we’d like…but still more than anywhere else.
So we love this place, America, because we really do believe it’s the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.
We love it enough that it’s hard to avoid getting suckered into tolerating, or even supporting, something completely unamerican, if it’s clothed in enough patriotic trappings.
The examples of that today are many…more than since the middle of the Cold War. But, aside from the many others which get plenty of bandwidth on the net already, there’s one which I almost never hear anyone speaking out against.
So I’m doing that, now.
Do you know who deserves to have the money for that new car you want to buy?
Whoever makes the best car in your price range. Frankly, that’s the only answer that fits with the Spirit of America.
Same with your shirt, your birdhouse, your silicon implants…whatever.
Yet some people, mostly bloated, bureaucratic corporations who make products which can’t compete on fair terms because they’re overpriced and underquality, have the nerve to tell us that it’s patriotic to “Buy American”. And because the word “American” is one we love, we’re tempted to fall for it.
But we need to stop.
If Mitsubishi and Hyundai make better cars than Ford and Chrysler, then they’re going to get more money. Then Ford and Chrysler are going to struggle. The solution? It’s for them to get off their lazy butts…and we, as Americans, are just the kind of straight-talkers to SAY that about them…and make better effing vehicles.
But if they can convince us to unconditionally “Buy American”, along with forcing us to give them billions in bailouts, then they don’t have to. They can keep making mediocre-or-worse cars. Which is what they’ve done since at least the mid seventies.
I remember an ad where Lee Iacoca leaned forward earnestly at what was implicitly his desk as a Ford executive, and said, in essence, “OK, we admit it, we have been half-assing the cars. But you taught us a lesson, so now we’re making really good cars. All you have to do is come back and try us out, we’ve decided that Quality is Job One, now.”
That was twenty-something years ago, if I recall correctly.
Just recently I saw another ad. Another car exec looking repentantly into the camera and ernestly saying something like “OK, we get it, we’ve been half-assing the cars. But you taught us a lesson, so now we’re making really good cars. We think quality is job one, now. No…really. This time we mean it.”
No, they’ll mean it when the people — who really do buy inferior cars because of emotional appeal — stop letting the FEELING of being patriotic come before the actual actions of American ideals.
I’m going to stick to being a REAL American, and you should, too.
Support whomever deserves it, because anything else is not only wrong, and unamerican, but self-destructive in the long run.
Beware the Coming [insert non-threat] Pandemic!!!
As you know, we’re all preparing for the devastating Swine Flu epidemic, which has reached our shores and infected eighty-something people.
It is destined to be the latest pandemic, taking its place alongside the millions of deaths America suffered during the BIRD Flu epidemic, West Nile epidemic, SARS epidemic, Mad Cow Disease…the list goes on, all of them heirs to the mass death of the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic.
And they all have this subtle trait in common:
They turned out to be sheer nonsense.
Nobody in the US has been killed by Bird Flu. Only already-sickly people in third-world countries like China, where a common cold can kill you, too.
A few Americans have actually died from West Nile, but only 1/10th the number who died from swimming pools, far less than 1/100th of the number who died from the common hospital infection, staph, in the same period.
Even in third world countries, SARS has a mortality rate of less than 10%. In the US, its mortality rate is ZERO.
And the same is true of Swine Flu. At the time of this writing, 80+ Americans have gotten it, and NONE have died. The normal flu is more dangerous.
And, of course, they can’t prove anyone’s ever really even GOTTEN mad cow, much less died from it.
For decades, people have been claiming to recognize what the next big 1918 Flu Pandemic heir will be.
But they always have to refer back to 1918, because 91 years ago is the last time it happened.
Why?
Because medical technology is so advanced that it’s not likely to EVER happen again.
In 1918, most of the ideas and techniques now ingrained in medicine were in their infancy. It was, really, the last good opportunity for a big pandemic to happen. Now, it’s too late.
So why do we keep hearing that the Next Big Epidemic is coming?
The same reason we keep hearing that we’re in imminent danger from asteroids and global warming:
Fear Equals Funding.
Because of budget-padding witch doctors at places like the CDC and NIH.
See, those guys have EXACTLY the same motivations as a tobacco scientist; Money.
Except that they have an even worse dependency upon money than a tobacco scientist. They have a budget that depends almost purely on fear.
DC bureaucrats actually use the phrase Fear Equals Funding, when discussing why they make things they know to be unlikely or harmless sound like doomsday.
Do a quick search for “CDC budget request” or “NIH budget request” on Google. You get results like this fearmongering from the Director of NIH, asking for more money for the next budget:
New threats and diseases constantly emerge. For example, soldiers suffering from blast injury highlight the importance of additional knowledge on traumatic brain injuries. Infectious diseases remain among the leading causes of death worldwide. More than 30 newly recognized infectious diseases and syndromes emerged in the last three decades alone, including HIV/AIDS and SARS. Infectious diseases that once seemed to be fading, such as tuberculosis and malaria, have resurged. New drug-resistant forms of once-easily treated microbial infections are emerging at a rapid pace. New strains of influenza occur each year. There is concern that a new influenza virus may emerge with the capacity for sustained human-to-human transmission, possibly triggering a pandemic similar to what occurred in 1918, 1957, and 1968.
Doom and gloom fearmongering. He is STILL robbing the taxpayer with the SARS bogeyman, years after Southpark mocked its irrelevantly low mortality rate:
Stanley, listen to me. I have SARS. There’s only a ninety-eight percent chance that I will live.
Likewise, you can find the CDC terrorizing the public with threats of “avian flu”, even though it’s caused ZERO deaths:
“Concerns that avian influenza (H5N1) could become the next influenza pandemic”
They also emit girlish shrieks about SARS and West Nile, in the same budget request.
The Swine Flu panic is not about saving people from imminent death, but about greed.
NIH/CDC official = Tobacco Scientist
The “Global War On Terror” is a Lie
The neocon philosophy of cowardice demands that we surrender our essential freedoms, in return for the promise of temporary safety
The neocons are parroting Conservative words, loud and shrill, these days. Suddenly they’re against the very same socialism and police state that they defended when Bush was doing it.
But you can be reminded that they’re neocon frauds, when they start fearmongering “terrorism”, which they seem unable to stop doing.
Recently, it’s been this insane pretense that the Somali pirates are terrorists.
Of course, you and I and every other rational person know:
Terrorists commit random acts of destruction/killing, to create an environment of fear, in order to work toward some political goal.
Pirates attack vessels in order to obtain wealth, either by looting or ransom. In a way, they are the opposite of terrorists.
The Somali ship-stealing guys are doing nothing but attacking vessels for loot/ransom. They are pirates, not terrorists.
Really, given the two definitions above, it takes a fool incompetent in the subject to confuse them.
Great way to identify some of the neocon fakes in talk shows and punditry.
But it doesn’t stop with the pirates.
They still pretend the resistance fighters in Iraq are terrorists.
Resistance fighters attack a foreign occupation force, in order to drive it from their country.
That’s what is happening in Iraq.
But the charade isn’t just one of pretending anything they don’t like is terrorism. The neocons also have double standards about whether terrorism is bad.
They support, for example, the training and funding of terrorists, as long as their mass murder is useful to us.
- When we trained and supplied Al Qaeda in the 1980s in Afghanistan, it was at their behest.
- When we supported Saudi Arabia’s building of Wahabi hate schools all around Asia in the 80s and 90s, the neocons were the reason.
- When we backed, and funded, the Pakistani fundamentalist Islamic dictatorship’s overthrow of the Afghani government by the Taliban, it was to the joy of the neocons.
Of course this hypocrisy extends beyond terrorism…the neocons fought to keep us openly supplying Weapons of Mass Destruction technology to Saddam Hussein in the 80s. But we’re dealing with their fake Terror War here, not their general sociopathic nature.
So, getting back to the topic, the neocons have undermined democracy in the middle east, refusing to deal with the elected government of Palestine, claiming they won’t support former “terrorists” in government…and yet backing, no matter what war crimes they commit, the former terrorists who run the Israeli government.
Blowing up buildings full of innocents in a land where you were not even born, as the future rulers of Israel did in the 1940s, is OK, but blowing up soldiers occupying your homeland and keeping you in concentration-camp conditions today is “terrorism”
Actually, it’s not. They’re resistance fighters, of course. Whether the Jewish people who moved to Palestine in the 1940s and started killing people there count as resistance fighters (you’re supposed to be locals fighting foreigners) is debatable. But there’s no question the Palestinian fighters are resisting foreign occupation.
Side Note: Precedent
We were all disgusted when the mass-murdering Russian government started calling resistance fighters “terrorists”, to parrot Bush. The problem is that Bush set that precedent, by abusing the word just as laughably.
Precedent is one of the practical reasons to not blindly defend “your guy” when he’s doing something wrong. Bush built many of his abuses on Clinton’s precedents. Clinton coined the phrase “war on terror”, and attacked both Iraq and Afghanistan in order to distract from domestic problems, while claiming to fight terrorists…a perfect lead-in for Bush. Likewise, Obama’s current socialist agenda, nationalizing banks, spending trillions on fake “stimulus”, is identical to what Bush was doing before he left office.
But, getting back to terrorism, precedent is its most ugly with the case of Obama using the police state Bush created, for his own domestic agenda. Verbally supporting liberty is literally being described in official government documents as terrorist, by the new, unconstitutional, and definitively police state Department of Homeland Security.
On the other hand, he has stopped referring to our inconsistent, hypocritical foreign policy as a “war on terror”, to the horror of the neocons, who are essentially saying this amounts to treason.
There is no actual Global War on Terror. Just a bunch of dishonest men advocating evils that they appear to believe will benefit themselves, while using fear to get you to submit to it. THAT is preying upon terror, as much as anything.
Unemployment Benefits INCREASE Unemployment
The recent increases in unemployment benefits, rather than helping fight unemployment, have actually increased unemployment dramatically
Subsidies Cause Surplus
If you wanted to have too many apples, you could simply get the government to pay billions of dollars to apple growers. You can do this with almost anything; it’s called a subsidy.
Aside from the many problems intentional subsidies always cause, there are many “unintentional” subsidies. Perhaps the worst of these is the unemployment subsidy.
When you give people money for each apple you grow, more people choose to grow apples, and apple growers choose to make more. It creates an imbalance, producing more apples than the society really finds worthwhile.
When you give people money based on how unemployed they are, you likewise cause more people to be unemployed, and people to be unemployed longer. I don’t even need to go into how that creates an imbalance, as (unlike apples) more unemployment is obviously, universally, bad.
Some people, mostly those who have little real-life experience (like a Kennedy or Bush family member) might say “But nobody would CHOOSE to stay unemployed, just for benefits”.
Second, they’re wrong…but I’ll get back to that.
First
FIRST, it doesn’t matter if nobody does it on purpose. When the Fed raises interest rates just 0.25%, fewer people buy houses. Not one human being actually says “I am not buying this house, because the Fed raised rates by a fraction of one percent”. It isn’t even raising home loan rates (it has no control over those), just the rate at which it lends to banks. Yet the trickle-down effect is fewer homes bought, in part because home loan rates creep up a tiny bit.
The same is true of unemployment. There is a trickle-down impact, over the span of 300,000,000 people, where some stay unemployed longer, and more BECOME unemployed, because unemployment is subsidized. As even a tiny increase in home loan interest rates invisibly pushes a few people over to the side of not buying a house, an increase in unemployment subsidy pushes a few people over into being unemployed.
Over the span of hundreds of millions of people, that is dramatic, in both cases.
And now we can get back to “second”:
Second
The ivory tower “nobody would choose to stay unemployed” people are wrong.
People DO choose not to work because they know they have an unemployment buffer.
They choose not to work as hard or otherwise volunteer to be the one laid off, choose not search as hard, pass up jobs they would otherwise take, and even actively stay unemployed, because of the unemployment benefits.
We who have real-life experience probably ALL, right now, know people who are doing this. Many of you, in fact, probably have done it. I am a consultant, so I don’t get unemployment benefits, but I’m sure it would influence me if I did.
I certainly have friends who actively cite the unemployment benefits as allowing them to take their time working. I even know someone who says they are glad the benefits have been extended, as they will be able to go for a year without looking for a job, now.
Sure, most states have some sort of fake attempt to require people to look for and take jobs. But there’s no way to actually make this work. It would cost more than unemployment benefits provide, to actually verify all the claims people make on their “looked for a job” forms. And any cheaper means of proving it would be draconian against all the people who were honest.
The Unemployment Subsidy
So yes, that’s exactly what the Liberals’ unemployment extension has done:
Increase unemployment, by subsidizing it.
We will have higher unemployment rates, and suffer this depression longer, because of the benefit increases. Yet another example of government’s coercive “help” making the problems they attack worse, instead of better.
Going Green is Bad for the Environment
Many of the wild claims made by Green lifestyle advocates are actually worse than doing nothing at all. They increase your carbon footprint, increase trash, and are generally bad for the planet, as well as harmful to people.
You may think you’re helping save the planet, or at least being a responsible member of society, if you recycle, avoid styrofoam, drive a hybrid, use electricity instead of fossil fuel, et cetera…
But, unfortunately, taking the advice of the “green living” trendies may actually do more harm than good.
“Green” environmentalism is chock-full of urban legends, inductive reasoning, and pseudoscience that end up harming the environment, as well as being directly bad for the people pushed to conform.
Here are some facts on the subject, gleaned from the Facebook group of the same name. JOIN Going Green is Bad for the Environment, if you want more info on the topic.
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Government-mandated Recycling Pollutes
… (not the for-profit kind) is usually so inefficient that it produces more pollution than making new paper, glass, and plastic! 13 of the top Superfund hazardous waste sites were once recycling centers!
[1] New York Times: Recycling is Garbage
[2] http://Pen & Teller on Recycling
Biofuels Have Huge Carbon Footprint
…actually have a bigger carbon footprint than simply using fossil fuel, because they require the clearing of land for agriculture, AND the farmers use fossil fuels to run their farm equipment.
[5] New Scientist Magazone: Forget Biofuels, Burn Fossil Fuels and Plant Forests
[6] How Big is the Biofuel Carbon Footprint
[7] Carbon Footprint of Biofuels: Can We Shrink it Down to Size in Time?
[8] London Times: Biofuels Produce More Greenhouse Gas than Fossil Fuels
Hybrid Cars are Worse than Normal Cars
…have batteries are so bad for the environment that you probably can’t drive one long enough to make up for the damage, before the battery goes bad and you need a new one, causing the problem all over again
[9] Prius Outdoes Humvee in Environmental Damage
Environmentalism Causes Forest Fires
Laws preventing the clearing of wood from “wild” areas, combined with efforts to prevent small forest fires, set up “tinderbox” situations, and are the reason the gigantic wildfires end up engulfing large areas
Continue reading
Monkeys Don’t Kill People; Xanax Does
Which is more responsible for the isolated incident of a lady being mauled by a chimp...this pigmy marmoset, or the drug the 200 lb ape was taking, that is known to cause violent aggression?
You’ve probably heard, in tedious detail, about the chimp, Travis, who ripped the face off some old lady.
What’s creepy about this story, more than it sounding like people are keeping pets that can kill them (as can horses and dogs), is the way power-hungry politicians are exploiting it, contextually lying, in order to pass unconstitutional laws we’d otherwise never tolerate.
The facts of the story are that a 200 lb chimp, who’d been raised as if a child by some woman who strikes me as emotionally akin to a “cat lady“, was secretly given the drug Xanax in his tea. Yes, she fed him tea. A few minutes later, he freaked out and bolted outside. When the lady’s friend, who apparently had a new hairstyle rendering her a “stranger”, showed up to help, Travis attacked her.
You may have noticed a detail that’s not normally mentioned, above. Travis was given a mood-altering drug, of which he was unaware. Xanax is a drug that is used to control people’s minds, but it has a well-documented “paradoxical” side effect of sometimes causing people to fly into insane rages, becoming violent and aggressive.
In fact, experts say that Xanax may very well have been the cause of the rampage. Why did journalists mostly ignore this detail? Who knows…perhaps it’s because they’re so likely to be under mood control drugs, themselves. /shrug
Now even people who know they’re taking that drug, and that it may cause them to become criminally aggressive, can be driven to act nuts by it…imagine some animal that doesn’t even know there’s a drug involved (probably doesn’t even understand the concept), who is being drugged.
I wouldn’t want to be around a collie or retriever who’d been driven mad by drugs, nor riding a horse in such a state.
So what’s the response of Big Brotherment to this incident?
Why, to ban the sale of ALL PRIMATES, of course.
Yes, that’s right; they are passing a ban on the sale of 1 inch long mouse lemurs, and all other primates, because some idiot prescribed a drug drug that can cause violent rages, to a 200 lb chimp.
If we were actually going to try to pass some over-reaching law to retroactively prevent this laughably rare, even isolated incident, surely it’d be something like “you can’t give huge apes drugs that might make them insane”, or even a ban on mood-control drugs entirely, which would be a loss ONLY insofar as prohibition is bad.
The truth is, of course, that one of the most vile things politicians do is try to pass laws based on single incidents. The already-suicidal chick who killed herself after someone else’s mom mocked her online has spawned a host of vile laws that are already being extended to speech outside their original intent, for example. Or the crazy Brady Law, that effectively banned only weapons that were not using in the shooting of its namesake. Or the ridiculous “security” measures set up after 9-11, that do zero to actually prevent future terror attacks. How, precisely, will you hijack a jumbo jet with nail clippers and a four ounce sippy cup?
Of course such laws are almost never passed by people who care about the incident at hand. They’re dishonest people who are actually attempting to forward some agenda of their own. In the case of Representative Blumenauer, author of the primate ban, he’s apparently one of those “pets are slaves” PETA nut-jobs, who has openly said that reptiles are next on his list of ban victims.
What we need, really, is fewer laws, not more of them. Banning the sale of lemurs so small that they’re are in danger of being eaten by mice, in response to the drugging of a man-sized ape, seems like one of those “Romans got brain damage from lead-lined aquaducts, and then things all went to hell” moments.
Representative Blumenauer appears to think these baby monkeys should be banned as a choking hazard.
Attacking AIG-style Bonuses Will Cause MORE Companies to Fail
Recently, I wrote an article about how Golden Parachutes are important for our economy, instead of bad.
And yet now we have people objecting to AIG fulfilling its contractual obligations to people who might otherwise have abandoned the company to collapse years ago.
This needs to be re-explained, in simpler, clearer terms:
- If a company is struggling, it needs the best people it can get, in order to TRY to save itself.
- If you are the best man for the job, then you don’t need to work for a struggling company. You are almost certainly going to choose a healthy, growing company where your job is secure.
- In order to obtain your services, a struggling company must either:
- Offer you far more money up front, which it probably can’t afford to do, or
- Offer you protection against the company failing, like a bonus that you will get even if, or only if, something goes wrong despite your best efforts
- In order for struggling companies to have a chance to survive, benefiting the entire economy and all of we who are in it, you must therefore have:
- The power to offer bonuses in case the company fails despite a manager’s best efforts
- enforcement of that bonus contract, so the potential managers trust it’ll get paid, and
- freedom from punishment for receiving such a bonus
The problem, here, is not AIG honoring a style of contract that is absolutely necessary for the health of our economy.
The real problem here is the same that we face whenever there is government intervention with our taxpayer money:
This form of socialism will always cause conflicts of interest, that will harm the recipient, the taxpayer, and the economy ever more, in a snowball effect.
Think of how people were trapped on welfare, from the 1970s through 1990s.
The government bailed out people in need, but then had to punish them if they ever made any progress in getting out of poverty, because it would be irresponsible to keep paying them the same amount of welfare, when they got even a little of their own income.
Likewise, many state governments violate your freedom of choice on health-related issues, on the premise that those states are paying for some people’s health care. They impose gigantic taxes on tobacco, alcohol, even convenient food, claiming that people who use them are raising government health care costs.
In all three cases, the freedom of private people is violated as a natural domino cascade starting with government taking your taxpayer money, and bailing people out with it.
Our response to this obvious conflict of interest, between bailouts and people’s free choices, should be to legislate against bailouts, not liberty.
Tired Today? Thank Government Arrogance.
What could be more megalomaniacal than declaring time, itself, wrong by an hour?
If our arrogant Congress announced that it was going to pass a law forcing you to get up an hour earlier, go to work an hour earlier, eat supper an hour earlier, et cetera, because this is somehow “in your own best interest”, it would not be tolerated.
It would be pointed out that the Federal government, as we all know, has no legitimate power to do this. Not only is no such power listed in the Constitution (its only source of authority, outside of threat of violence), but the very principles of liberty upon which our country is founded say that NO government could ever rightfully have such authority.
And yet here we are, getting up an hour earlier, dragging to work an hour earlier, eating supper an hour earlier, trying to make ourselves sleep an hour earlier, even though studies say this is harmful for us, can even shorten our lifespans and doing so for two extra months, this year.
Why?
Because that power-mad government, a while back, found a way to game the system. It can’t get away with telling you when to go to work, but it can simply declare TIME ITSELF to be wrong.
Is there a stronger word than simply “arrogant”?
The sun, the Creator, the cosmos…all of it is off by one hour, because some megalomaniacs in DC think that it’s better if we are forced to get up earlier.
If you wish to get up earlier, to save electricity or match your schedule to banks or farmers, that is your right, and should be your choice. If anyone were to pass a law forcing you to get up later, it would be a crime against you.
But the same is true in reverse. People should not be forced to get up earlier, jeopardizing their health, increasing their stress, or even simply inconveniencing themselves. It is their natural right to choose, just as it is yours.
So aside from increasing the sleep deprivation that shortens lifespans, risk of heart attack, traffic accidents, childhood behavior problems, business costs, and so on, it also puts the US behind Kazakhstan (who ended forced daylight savings time) on the protection of your natural rights.
We can choose to save electricity by getting up earlier, or our lives by sleeping in...we don't need Big Brotherment to violate our choices "for your own good"
So You Thought Oil Prices Were NOT Driven Up by War?
Resistance fighters in Gaza, struggling against the internationally condemned occupation of Palestine by the Israeli government, have been shooting shoulder-fired missiles at Israel for years, now. They have even killed a handful of people, in their largely-fruitless effort.
Faced with an election, and the need for an October Surprise, the Israeli government decided to “retaliate” against this long-standing effort, by slaughtering a few thousand semi-random Palestinians, by attacking ANYONE who lived in the areas from whence the missiles supposedly were being fired.
The effect on the US, other than dirtying its hands by unconditionally defending the Israeli government’s war crimes?
Oil prices, that were steadily declining for months, as I noted and explained here, suddenly reversed themselves, and have climbed since the butchery started.
The only glimmer of hope for the US economy, keeping hope of not being entirely trapped in another economic depression, was the dramatic drop in the oil prices that helped create the depression in the first place.
Anyone who thinks the previous, 700% inflation of oil prices were from a weak dollar, or oil shortages, or growth in demand, et cetera, take note. As illustrated in this chart, the actual cause of high oil prices was, and is today, foreign policy strife.
We’re backing “retaliation” against the Palestinian neighborhoods that is killing tens, or hundreds, of times more innocents than the Palestinian resistance fighter attacks do, and the sole “benefit” we get is newly crippling oil prices.
Super-Sizing Sour Grapes
What Americans have, even in the midst of an economic depression, is an embarrassment of riches.
When the citizens of other countries complain that Americas eat too much, what they are really saying is “We are jealous of America’s plentiful food”; Despite (or because of) all their redistributive, anti-choice socialist programs, the typical European has less access to food, in diversity or amount, than even the poorest fifth of Americans. Maybe nobody in Europe goes hungry, but they don’t really prosper, either. (facebook readers beware; the rest of the article is after the picture, don’t ask me why that happens)
A Fox found a bunch of grapes, on a vine over a lofty branch. Turning round with a One, Two, Three, he jumped up, but with no success. At last he had to give it up, and walked away with his nose in the air, saying: "I am sure they are sour, anyway." MORAL: It is easy to despise what you cannot get.
And when they say “Americans are too fat”, what they mean is “Americans are more affluent”. Americans don’t need to walk as much, or otherwise engage in as much involuntary physical labor. Even poor Americans have more comfortable homes, more access to cars, more video games and computers, infinitely better television, more leisure, even without the Europeans’ governments forcing them to suffer the pay cut imposed by a mandatory six week vacation every year.
Of course their response to this being pointed out is “more leisure? More entertainment? More living space? Bah! What kind of horrible way of measuring quality of life! People must be equal, not happy, you dirty materialist!” And yet, of course, everything about socialism is materialistic, an endless class war of envy and hate, worrying about who has more than whom, redistributing wealth, controlling our choices. That is the reason Marxists called it the Materialist Dialectic.
But it turns out that socialism traps people in stagnancy and perpetual shortages, while freedom allows people to have many more things. So, naturally, the actual materialists had to turn around and claim that prosperity is “decadent”, and “greedy”. How it can be more greedy than wanting to redistribute other people’s money for oneself, I don’t know.
Americans have a tendency to be hard workers. They are, statistically, the most productive society on the planet…but people, in general, who have access to more food and more leisure have to learn how to balance that with the need to choose to maintain physical fitness. Even if Americans, as a society, do learn that, the percentage of individuals who do not will still drag down the “average”.
An embarrassment of riches is a wonderful problem to have. “Oh no, too many people want to date me!” “Oh woe, I’ve grown so many tomatoes, I must give them away!” “Pitty me: now that I’ve won the lottery, people keep asking me for money!”
Who would seriously choose a life of more hunger, less choice, and more involuntary struggle over one where they need to choose to struggle a bit to stay in good physical condition?
In tests, lab animals that go somewhat hungry live longer. This probably is true of people as well…but what benefit is the added life, if it’s a result of being forced to do with less?
We’re better off being faced with the need to control how much to work out, to watch our diet, et cetera, than being lean because we haven’t the chance to be flappy even if we were irresponsible. To be free to choose whether to life short, fat, comfortable lives, or strive for longer, healthier lives.
Some of us will chose wrong…but that isn’t necessarily limited to the ones who choose leisure.
For some people, the effort may make life less worthwhile. For others, the working to “stay fit” might actually be more fun, as well as healthier.
Americans are free to choose, whereas the victims of socialism in the rest of the world have what is supposedly best forced upon them “for your own good”, in a one-size-fits-all solution. People are better off being free to determine their own size.
That’s why even the most enlightened, economically and socially homogeneous European country still has more citizens wishing to become Americans, than Americans (despite our larger population) wishing to move to that country.
The price of choice, is the risk of mistakes. Even life-altering ones. But, overall, the benefit far outweighs the cost.
Americans can be proud to have the freedom that allows us the prosperity to choose whether to supersize their meals. The reason the rest of the world complains, ultimately, is that they are deprived of even the option. They have super-sized Sour Grapes.
Golden Parachutes, Explained
It sounds outrageous, that some companies end up filing for bankruptcy restructuring, or even vanishing entirely, while their presidents and CEOs leave the companies with bonus severance packages of millions of dollars, a “golden parachute“.
It seems unfair to the workers, who are out of jobs, the investors and stock holders, and everyone else who gets nothing.
Why should an executive, who obviously failed everyone, whose very competence as a manager is in question, get enough money to retire on, while everyone else has to struggle a disastrous end to the venture?
It sounds terrible, that executives get huge bonuses when a company goes under, but this clause actually saves many companies in the first place.
Why on earth do companies offer them, in the first place? Especially the ones that are already struggling…shouldn’t they refuse to offer a big severance package when they’re likely to go under, anyway?
Well, in fact, the struggling companies don’t want to offer those packages.
What happens is that the company does know it’s struggling, and so it is looking for the best CEO it can find, someone who can save it when its last managers obviously were just making things worse. But when they call the best guy available, they run into two problems:
- First, they can’t afford him, because they’re struggling. The money for his high salary could bankrupt them.
- Second, he doesn’t want to risk his reputation. If the company turns out to be too far gone, he will definitely get blamed, even if he did all that was possible.
Fortunately, they can solve both of these in one :
They can offer a lower salary now…what they and the executive agree they can afford, plus a huge severance package.
If the company is saved, then he’s earned it.
If the company goes under despite his great skill, then he gets compensated for his damaged reputation, and the pay cut he took during the time he worked there.
This means that a struggling company can hire a better executive, therefore increasing the company’s chances of surviving, if it offers a golden parachute.
So it’s actually better for the workers, shareholders, investors, and customers if a company does offer a golden parachute. Not just struggling companies, either…because it can always improve the executive a company can hire, therefore improving the company’s future.
Now there are other, obvious benefits to having golden parachutes.
Golden parachutes also help protect companies from hostile takeovers, because the executives of the taken-over company, inevitably all fired, will cost millions to the devouring company.
Really, any way you look at it, companies being able to offer golden parachutes is good for all involved. Including the regular employees.
Why Deflation is Bad…for You, Private Property, and Capitalism
Politicians and journalists are worried, right now, about a downward spiral of deflation, of the type that normally comes in an economic depression.
They are pointing to two signs we are having bad deflation…first, the falling price of commodities like oil, and the disappearance of money in this economic failure causing demand to plunge. One of those is actually good, the other is very bad.
When prices go down naturally, because of an increase in efficiency or improvement in technology, it is good for everyone.
For example:
- Improved efficiency makes the manufacture of computers cheaper, while more advanced computers make the old versions cost less.
- Food used to take up most of humanity’s effort, therefore most of a family’s cost of living, but has declined to third or fourth place as technology and efficiency allowed us to grow more with less.
The decline in oil prices, returning to only double their normal level, will cause a good kind of global price decline, because most prices are effected by the cost of the energy required to create and deliver products and services.
But, again, those specific cost reductions are not deflation.
What Are Real Deflation and Inflation?
When money deflates, people choose to just hold onto it, starving the marketplace and causing a spiral of ever more deflation
In real economic terms, inflation and deflation happen when the ratio of money to economic wealth changes. If the amount of money becomes greater, in comparison to the economy, then you get inflation. Because the most common result of this is for prices to increase, we confuse the terms and call general price increases “inflation”, but actually it’s the change in ratio that is inflation.
The eleven trillion-plus dollars of capital that have purportedly vanished in the past few months represent a huge decline in money supply, causing actual deflation. This failure was caused by the inability of central authority to manage money any better in the US than it could provide shoes and food in the Soviet Union.
Prices Can Increase Without Inflation, Too
Prices can actually increase for other reasons, and that’s not really inflation. For example, when oil increased 600% in price, it drove up the cost of production, without regard for the number of dollars in the economy. This general price increase was NOT inflation.
And when prices decrease for other reasons, it’s not deflation.
Inflation is Harmful
We all know that when the ratio of money to wealth increases, causing inflation, it is bad for the economy, and especially for the poor and middle classes. This is because it usually drives up prices, and the poorer you are, the more of your wealth and well-being is in cash.
Poorer people depend on cash they have in a bank, or other savings. They are paid by employers who give them only a set rate, plus raises for special reasons like increased skill.
Wealthier people tend to have more of their wealth in assets like, stocks and real estate, that will simply increase in price, sheltering them from some of the effect if inflation. They get cost of living increases in salary every year, on top of any other raises.
Deflation is Harmful, too
But the opposite kind of damage occurs if you have deflation, and is compounded by a new problem.
First, deflation artificially drives down prices. To a person with no real assets or investments, this sounds good, because “stuff costs less”.
But it comes at a horrible price.
Deflation punishes investments that can raise people from poverty, both personal investments, and business growth
For example, the decline in prices includes wages. Deflation is universal, with a shortage of money everywhere, so that your income will decline, along with the price you pay for things. What good is cheaper stuff, if you also have less money?
So people with fewer assets and no investments will more or less end up breaking even. But they still lose out in the end, because they become blocked from gaining assets, trapping them in relative poverty.
For example:
How Deflation Traps the Poor and Middle Class
Imagine you’re buying a house. Not on a sub-prime loan, but one where your income is perfectly fit for the home you’re getting.
It’s probably a thirty year loan. So you’re going to be stuck paying on the original price of your house, for thirty years, at the original size of house payment.
Now remember that your income (in dollars) is getting smaller every year. That’s deflation.
And the price of your house, too. Each year, its is worth fewer dollars, yet your original debt is the same. And so are your payments.
Within just a few years, you are making far less money, but are stuck with the same size house payment you always had.
While you still have to pay the same percentage of of your paycheck income for food, electricity, and so on, your house payment takes up a higher percentage of that money every year.
Soon, your income has shrunken to the point where you cannot make your house payment at all. Not even if you paid your whole check to the bank every week.
And worse, you can’t simply sell his house to get out of it. The price of your house has also declined every year. Selling it now that the payment is too high won’t even pay off your remaining house debt.
Of course people would quickly learn this, and that they simply cannot buy houses, unless they are so incredibly wealthy that they can save up enough to pay cash.
But even those wealthy people who can pay cash for a house now face the situation where buying a house is a horrible investment, because the house’s value will decline, in dollars.
It would actually be better to leave the money in a vault, and rent monthly, even for a billionaire, because the money’s value increases, while the house’s price declines. One thousand dollars will be worth more next year, if you simply stick it in your mattress, than one thousand dollars worth of house will be worth in that same year.
In fact, owning land becomes a losing proposition. With even the wealthy better-off renting, who’s going to actually be the landlord?
Deflation Attacks Economic Freedom
In fact, ALL property ownership becomes punished!
With deflation, anything you buy does not just depreciate with use and age, but declines in value every year with prices, compared to if you’d simply kept the money.
Today, you could buy that console game, or car, or collectible, and then sell it on eBay a few years from now and recoup part of the cost. But with deflation, the price you recoup is even farther from if you’d kept the cash in the first place.
Deflation Destroys Capitalism
Deflation punishes investment and property ownership, attacking capitalism at its roots
In fact (and this is where the entire economy implodes from deflation), simply holding on to your money is rewarded versus ANY investment, in a deflationary economy. If you put your money in a big ol’ vault, removing it from the economy entirely, it grows in value every year. But if, instead, you buy stocks, or invest in commodities, then your money is gone, replaced with an asset that becomes worth less every year, in dollar terms.
The growth of every business, in fact, would be undone by the rate of deflation. Now from the company’s standpoint, that is fine, because its expenses decline every year by the same amount.
But from an investor’s standpoint, a company growing at 2% per year during 3% deflation would mean you lose 1% over just stuffing your money in a safe. And yet you also risk, when investing money.
Why bother investing even in a company you think might grow at 5%, when you could have a 100% safe 3% investment in a vault under your mattress? So, really, the company facing deflation is NOT fine, because it discovers that it’s far harder to get investors. In fact, the entrepreneur who would have started that company is 3% punished each year for the effort, making him that much less likely to even bother.
With investors discouraged because of deflation, it becomes harder to create wealth. Capitalism, in fact, becomes almost impossible:
- An entrepreneur can’t get investors for his new project.
- There’s less reason to buy stocks, so companies can’t raise capital.
- You can’t get a loan to start a business, because your company’s income would decline every year, yet the loan payment would stay as large as ever.
With deflation, the very engines of capitalism all die out.
Speculation Defines Capitalism
It is the uncertain investment on the wild new idea that makes capitalism superior to central planning. Anyone can decide to invest in a “sure thing”: if that were good enough, socialism would work, because a government bureaucrat could declare money for the obvious solution. It’s diverse people choosing to risk money on many different wild ideas that lets the best solutions rise to the top.
But that very kind of capital investment, in a deflationary economy, is punished, because you get such a good deal by not investing in anything at all, but holding your money in a vault.
All of this, by the way, is aside from the additional destruction caused by the lack of downward price elasticity on many commodities and time-based investments. That’s much more arcane, but a key source of economic depression, that I’ll get into some other time.
For now, it’s enough to realize that prices being FORCED downward by deflation includes your pay, and the value of any investments you make, so that private property ownership, borrowing, and investing, in fact all capitalism, is crippled under deflation.
Not a Recession: A Depression
Why does this economic downturn seem different than previous ones in our lifetime? Why does it seem familiar to anyone who is familiar with the economic history of 19th and early 20th centuries?
Because, up to the mid 1940s, the US tended to face economic depressions. Since then, we had not had one…until now.
What we are suffering, today, is an economic depression.
Sure, it had been trendy, in the last decade or more, to say “we just stopped using the D word after the Great Depression”. But, once again, anyone who knows economic history realizes there’s more to it than that.
There is no official definition of an economic depression, other than the idea that they’re worse than recessions.
There isn’t really an official definition of an economic recession, either, although the pat answer is “two quarters of GPD shrinkage”. Real economists hate that definition, because it ignores more factors than it considers, to the point of being almost useless.
But we can simply examine what were called “depressions”, from 1800 through 1938, and compare them to the recessions between 1947 and 2007, and the differences are obvious.
Depressions, Described
Each depression / panic from 1819 through 1938 shared certain traits:
A shortage of money itself, leading to
- Usually at least 2 years, as many as 23 years
- Sudden runs on banks, causing bank failures
- Commodity price collapse, where something generic like cotton, steel, oil, or real estate plunged in value, causing a domino effect that devastated the economy
- A more general decline in prices across the economy
- A collapse in capital, for example stock market collapse, once that became an important factor
- A credit freeze, making loans and other forms of obtaining temporary money more difficult
- Massive business closings
- Astonishing amounts of job loss and unemployment
Now what about the subsequent “recessions”, from 1948 through 2003?
Recessions, Rescribed
Every one of them happened like this:
A dramatic raising of interest rates by the Federal Reserve, followed by
- Usually only a few months, rarely more than a year
- An increase in private interest rates
- An increase in unemployment
- Moderate to extreme price increases
- A plunge in the stock market and moderate tightening of capital
- Some amount of business failure
You can see examples of both recessions and depressions at the History of Economic Downturns.
What’s the Difference?
We face, as was normal during the days of the gold standard, massive bank runs, a credit freeze, price failures
Now the most obvious difference is timespan.
During the days of economic depressions, the downturns lasted much longer. Always years, sometimes decades. Economic recessions generally only last months, rarely more than a year…the longest recession has not lasted as long as the shortest depression.
The second is that the trigger is slightly different.
Depressions were caused by a direct shortage of currency (money) in the economy. This, in fact, led to the other obvious differences, like runs on banks, mostly caused by a shortage of money making people worry about bank stability.
Recessions, on the other hand, have been preceded, in every single case, by the Federal Reserve raising rates, trying to make it harder to get new money. That’s very similar, but it leaves the financial sector able to compensate, however painfully, so that bank runs and commodity price failures never become “necessary”.
And that’s probably the next most important difference:
During the depressions, bank runs were almost universal, commodity price collapse was normal, the loss of huge numbers of jobs and businesses was a constant.
In the era of recessions, none of those things occurred at all. Unemployment, though miserable, was generally only a few percentage points higher, and while some businesses failed, nothing like the tens of thousands of the depression days, even though the economy was smaller back then.
Now, which are we seeing today?
Are We Depressed?
- Runs on banks, and bank failures
- Real estate price collapse, along with some other commodities, including many metals like gold, copper, and nickel
- The massive price inflation expected to result from high energy prices failed to materialize, representing an inability of people to pay more, even though production cost had to rise
- A collapse in capital, for example stock market free-fall
- A failure in credit, making loans and other forms of obtaining temporary money more difficult
- Massive business closings
- A rising snowball of job loss and unemployment
Well, this does indeed sound almost exactly like a depression, not a recession.
And, in fact, it was preceded by a money shortage, just like other depressions. In our case, the shortage was caused by high oil prices, two wars, and hundreds of billions in new foreign “aid” shipping trillions of dollars overseas, much faster than the Federal Reserve was creating new money. This meant that, while the surplus of foreign-based dollars caused its value to plunge compared to foreign money, here in the US there was less money available than usual.
Without as much money, we could not maintain the prices of some commodities, we became distrusting of banks, credit became scarce…ultimately, a new economic depression was natural.
Why didn’t we have depressions from 1948 through 2007?
Up to the 1940s, the US had usually depended upon gold, and sometimes silver, to back its money. It claimed you could cash in a paper dollar, any time you wanted, for gold. This meant that money was, in a sense, just a glorified form of barter for a commodity.
In those days of a gold standard, if the economy grew faster than the supply of gold, this created a shortage of money, which could only grow as fast as people could dig up gold. When the economy grew faster, the relative shortage of money would eventually force banks to close, commodity prices to plunge, prices to decline, credit to freeze, and generally the economy to grind to a halt, to wait for gold to catch up.
That ended in 1946, when the US entered into the Breton Woods agreement. This was a sort of price fixing scheme, where instead of making a dollar equal to a certain amount of gold for exchange, each government just attempted to force the price of gold to remain a certain amount, compared to its money.
This happened to coincide, exactly, to the end of economic depressions. Without money being linked to the barter of a commodity that had its own separate value and supply, it did not end up in such short demand that the whole economy would fail. The recessions that did occur were from money shortages caused by the Federal Reserve, but these could be overcome, so banks never had runs, commodity prices never collapsed, et cetera.
This became even more true in the 1970s, when even the Breton Woods agreement was ended, and the price of gold became a legitimate free market price, not a fixed one.
Why are we having a depression, today?
As I noted earlier, this is the first time since the 1930s when there was a shortage of money so grave that we stopped trusting banks, could not pay for important commodities, and so on.
This is because we sent so much money overseas, out of our own reach.
The normal money we have sent abroad for decades, because we buy goods, was actually barely enough to keep up with foreign demand for dollars…but in 2001, that began to change:
The price of oil went through the roof. At its peak, we were paying 700% of oil’s natural price. This amounted to as much as one trillion dollars leaving the US to import oil, without getting anything in return (beyond what we normally got for 1/7th the amount).
Meanwhile, we engaged in two wars, that cost hundreds of billions of dollars, much of which went to foreign countries.
And, in order to support those wars, paid hundreds of billions in new “foreign aid”, money shipped abroad with no imported wealth to offset it, at all.
This left us without enough money to simply run our own economy.
The result? Bank closings, real estate and other price failures, massive unemployment, bankrupcies, business failures…
Another economic depression.
About
This site has its origins before the word “Blog” existed. Back then its owner, Kaz, was simply thought of as having a website that published socio-political articles with regularity…But the only real difference was that the RSS/XML protocals were not yet used this way.
The website was known as Site of the Sentient, a reference to the famous Words of the Sentient, that Kaz had been editing for years previously.
When some random portal site hijacked the domain siteofthesentient.com, it was a dark time for the human knowledge quest. Fortunately, But Now You Know is striving to take up the slack, and even has some revamped versions of the original articles, for example Conscription, is it Slavery, and How to Get Out of Jury Duty, and be a hero instead of a bad citizen.
Kaz is a writer, graphic artist, and supplements his income by being a hardcore senior web developer.
Along with this blog, you can track his efforts with the dedicated facebook page here.
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